Fittingly, Medium founder and CEO Evan Williams shared a few details of the company’s roadmap with the crowd during the last session at Roadmap 2014. Expect a new home page (“our home page is terrible”) and a new mobile app.

At the center of any good product design is a whole lot of heart. Mladen Barbaric, the founder and CEO of Pearl Studios, explained at Gigaom’s Roadmap conference Wednesday why design is a “deeply human and profoundly emotional” process, and design projects created with love have a better chance to resonate with the general populace.

When designers stray too far from a product’s original purpose, it doesn’t work. Ammunition founder Robert Brunner offered up a checklist at Gigaom Roadmap that companies should check every time they develop a connected device.

Before people start truly embracing autonomous cars, first need people to trust them enough to ride in them. That’s not going to be easy — a recent study found that 88 percent of Americans said there’s no way they’d ride in a driverless car.

In the mid-20th century, designers turned away from heavy concrete to embrace lighter, more subtle materials. A similar shift is underway in the tech industry right now, as companies are adopting minimalism as a way to overcome the demands posed by small screens and powerful processors.

If you’ve seen Android 5.0, you’ve seen Google’s new Material Design language. It may look new, but it started conceptually more than 2.5 years ago and anticipated what computer hardware would be capable of today and in the future.

Google Maps has long been the navigation method of choice on Android phones so does Nokia’s HERE Maps have a chance to change that? Absolutely thanks to far better offline mapping capabilities shown in this comparison video on the Galaxy S5.

The Misfit Flash is a new piece of wearable technology that takes most of the functions from the more expensive Misfit Shine and puts it into a soft-touch plastic package that will retail for under $50.

Really great design disappears. So how do you build that into a complex product? Come learn how from the best designer thinkers in the tech industry at Gigaom’s experience design conference Roadmap 2014.

Technology and fashion don’t often come together in elegant ways, but a collaboration between Ralph Lauren and smart clothing maker OMsignal aims to take wearable devices beyond fitness trackers and smart watches.

In the past it was difficult for companies to leave the confines of their chosen medium, but not now. Behance co-founder Scott Belsky believes companies should be constrained by their missions, not the media they work in.

For established carmakers, design is a very iterative process with decades of work to build from. Tesla Motors had no such history to work with, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing said the company’s chief designer.

Instead of trying to come up with a different service that would replace email, the team behind Mailbox decided to accept the fact that users are stuck in their email inboxes and try to improve the experience.

Having hundreds of millions of users makes it easy for companies to test every little feature they put out. But does such data-driven thinking compromise the design process? Instagram’s Kevin Systrom offers some thoughts on design and life inside Facebook.

For workspace designer Jennifer Magnolfi, tackling a crumbling downtown Las Vegas and turning it into a place that inspires interaction and creativity was a whole new experience. What she saw, though, was that smart design can have amazing effects even in unlikely places.

Noted designer Erik Spiekermann has called Apple’s typeface choice a “youthful folly.” Speaking at Gigaom’s Roadmap, he explained what he meant and offered other insights into how he sees the world of design.

Technology cycles have been on a tear for decades, with each chip iteration bringing more capabilities at lower prices. But less can be more in tech products–and design is the way to balance that factor.

Robert Brunner, chief designer at headphone powerhouse Beats By Dre, started off our Roadmap conference in fine style, making salient points about tech’s attention-deficit risk, the need for tactility, and why Google Glass’s marketing is failing on the fashion front.

Design isn’t just about aesthetics, it’s about the creation of experiences that add value to your life. Tomorrow we’ll kick off two days of discussion about experience design for the tech industry at our Roadmap conference.

The only thing that has ever remained constant about the tech industry is swift change. Our goal is to stay five steps ahead of that change so that you, our readers, can be at least two or three steps ahead.

Design legend Erik Spiekermann, who will be speaking at our experience design conference in November in San Francisco, has spent decades creating and redesigning typefaces, which can influence culture both subtly and powerfully.

High tech, hipster design shop Berg has been transitioning into a full-fledged product maker. We sat down with Berg’s CEO to talk transition and what to expect from the quirky brains behind Little Printer.

Instagram has come up with a nifty hack that uses data from phones sensors to automagically straighten photos — which in turn means, you will get more likes and your followers will enjoy the photos more. Just don’t ask me why!

Adobe continues its design tear and acquihires San Francisco consultancy Ideacodes. It’s the third acquisition in the past 6 months that Adobe hopes will help it transition its Creative Suite to the cloud.

According to Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom, increasing speeds of the mobile app experience immediately encourages people to use the apps more. When mobile broadband speeds inhibit speed, app makers have to speed things up on their end.

Sound is one of the main ways we interact with our surroundings and so SoundCloud wants to find as many different ways as possible to incorporate it into how we interact with the internet too, co-founder Alex Ljung told attendees at RoadMap on Monday.

Government is one of the most important and outdated areas of our lives when it comes to the impact that technology design principles have had on the way cities, states, and the federal government operate. Code for America wants to change that.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said at GigaOM RoadMap that creating an experience for users to share what they find appealing and beautiful has been a challenge, but nothing like keeping them engaged in an era of shortened attention spans.

As the computer revolution has morphed into today’s web, design has a more important seat at the table. Not only is the web visual, but the data generated and the loss of hierarchy enabled by the web has created leadership challenges that good design can solve.

Working with a small team of less than 20 people on a first-time hardware product is tough to do things perfectly the first time, Tony Fadell, founder of Nest Labs said Monday. He talked about how customer feedback informed a quick redesign of the company’s product.

Cars are becoming a platform for connecting their occupants to their data, their cloud services, to their auto maker, to other cars. If you think you’re car’s smart and connected now, just wait till you put it on your data plan.

What ties many design parts together into a highly desired, functional product? Connectedness, ranging from user interface, user experience, product functions and self-healing, says Yves Behar. Touch is a big factor and you might be surprised by which companies Behar says are doing it right.

Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said Hurricane Sandy was probably the company’s biggest moment, with users tagging 800,000 photos with the “#Sandy” hashtag, compared to about 85,000 photos tagged with the Super Bowl hashtag this year. He said they embraced the participatory nature.

Here you’ll find live coverage of GigaOM RoadMap 2012, as well as a link to the livestream of the event. Join us for what promises to be one of the most interesting and wide-ranging discussions we’ve hosted all year on design in the age of connectedness.

Pinterest has been one of the biggest web success stories of past 12 months. Its growing influence on fashion and product oriented web sites is now extending to e-commerce sites. A growing number of e-tailers from eBay to mom-and-pop operations are adopting the grid-like look.

John Maeda, the President of the Rhode Island School of Design, and a pioneer of computer-based visual art at the MIT Media Lab, will take the stage at RoadMap, on November 5th in San Francisco, and talk about leadership, design and connected culture.

Pandora’s CTO Tom Conrad talks to us about designing for the ears, as part of the book we’re creating for our RoadMap conference, which will take place on November 5th in San Francisco, and will focus on design in the age of connectedness.

Kickstarter co-founder and CEO Perry Chen is the latest to join an all star line-up of speakers for GigaOM RoadMap conference, scheduled to be held on November 5 in San Francisco. Other speakers include Evan Williams (Twitter and Obvious), Instagram’s Kevin Systrom and Birchbox’s Katia Beauchamp.

Whether it’s mobile devices like Square’s payment system or products that monitor our health and wellness, one of the threads running through the recent GigaOM RoadMap conference was the idea that successful technology involves making the computer disappear, even as it becomes more powerful.

The world today is more plugged in than ever before. The question now is: Are there still new frontiers that can benefit from added connectivity? We pulled aside a few tech industry leaders who spoke at the GigaOM RoadMap 2011 conference to find out.

A bad 2-D movie is something you can shrug off, but a bad 3-D movie can make you physically sick, said DreamWorks Animation CTO Ed Leonard at our GigaOM Roadmap conference in San Francisco on Thursday. Still, DreamWorks is very much committed to 3-D.

It might sound like science fiction, but Jawbone Founder and CEO Hosain Rahman says we’re headed to an era where our bodies can be connected to everything in our worlds, including our air conditioners. But it all starts with gathering data and understanding what it means.

Printed books may have been groundbreaking technology 500 years ago, and they still have plenty of value as an information-distribution platform — but they are no longer good for every purpose, Matt MacInnis of digital textbook publisher Inkling told the GigaOM RoadMap conference on Thursday.

Matt Mullenweg, who created the Wordpress blogging platform and co-founded a spinoff called Automattic, says he is committed to supporting the open-source movement because he and Wordpress have benefited from it so much. Matt will be speaking about this and other topics at GigaOM’s RoadMap conference.